What if the thing marketers have spent decades trying to scale is about to become nearly free?
Words. Images. Videos. Campaign variations. Personalized emails. Ad copy. Landing pages. Product descriptions. SEO articles. Social posts.
More content. More personalization. More campaigns. More automation. More messages.
This is where Seth Godin's recent conversation about building remarkable brands in the age of AI becomes particularly interesting.
Godin argues that businesses cannot cost-reduce their way to greatness. Instead, AI should eventually be used to make work better and more valuable—not merely cheaper. He also returns to an older but increasingly important idea: a brand is fundamentally a promise, and trust emerges when that promise is consistently kept, especially when doing so is difficult.
It may transform what a brand is. When Content Becomes Infinite, Content Stops Being Scarce
Television. Newspapers. Billboards. Search results. Email inboxes. Social feeds.
Attention is scarce → content competes for attention → distribution creates value.
And whenever technology makes one resource abundant, another resource usually becomes strategically important.
If everyone can generate 10,000 pieces of content, then 10,000 pieces of content no longer represent differentiation.
If everyone can personalize a sales email, personalization itself stops being remarkable.
The technology that makes communication easier can make communication less valuable.
And synthetic abundance creates noise at a scale traditional marketing systems were never designed to handle.
Godin's argument is therefore important: the purpose of AI should not simply be reducing the number of humans required to perform existing tasks. It can instead be used to make the underlying work more valuable.
How do we create something that becomes more valuable because intelligence is available?
If your product genuinely helps someone make a better decision, solve a difficult problem, avoid a costly mistake, or achieve an outcome they could not easily achieve before, then the boundary between:
And trust becomes an accumulated dataset of fulfilled promises. The Brand Is No Longer Just a Promise
This is why the next generation of valuable AI companies may not simply be "AI assistants."